Saturday, January 31, 2015

I've been looking at sales figure for 2014 and thought this would be a good opportunity to give a little mention/fanfare to some of our best sellers. This is a highly unscientifically researched list as it includes all sales from 1st Jan - 31st Dec and is not weighted in any way to take account of new products introduced during the year, or seasonal lines. I think there are also some spurious sales which skew the results (like the French Sticks being used in buffets in great quantities). So any shopkeepers out there might not want to use this as a buying guide. But for those who want to give a little round of applause to our caveat-ed 2014 best sellers, here they are...

Most Popular Bread: French Stick, followed very closely (57 fewer) by the small white farmhouse (sliced).

Most Purchased Cake / Biscuit: In a packet the Gingerbread man was the best selling, from our counter, the Marathon Flapjack won. I might need to develop a cross between those two items. It's bound to be a runaway success! (sorry) "Run Run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the marathon gingerbread man".

... Cheese: Snowdonia Cheese Company Black Bomber (beating the second place cheese by more than 67kg).

... Ice Cream: Salcombe Dairy Madagascan Vanilla.

... Jam / Marmalade / Honey: Susie's Strawberry Jam and Susie's Three Fruit Marmalade / Berkshire Honey. The honey statistics are really unfair as months go by when I don't have some of our honey varieties whilst I wait for the weather to warm up and the bees to produce more.

... Milk:Semi-skimmed one litre. The second most popular milk was the one
litre non-homogenised organic milk. But it was more than one thousand units behind, so not exactly a close contest! I suspect that this year we
might sell more of the non-homogensised full fat milk as customers are
seeking it out for toddlers and to make their own cheeses.

... Oil/Vinegar: Not a level playing field. Technically the best selling oil was coconut oil. But we only have two varieties of that and more than a dozen different plain extra virgin olive oils (and plenty of flavoured ones as well). So I'm also going to declare Zaytoun'sPalestinian Extra Virgin Olive Oil a winner as well. Even though it was actually 4th after coconut oil, rapeseed oil (which we had 2 versions of) and ghee (we only have one variety).

Similarly, the best selling vinegar was Raw Health Apple Cider Vinegar with Mother, but that is used in far more ways than any of our balsamics, and we only offer one cider vinegar.

... Olives/Antipasti: Our best selling product in a jar was the Sun dried tomato meze from Olive Branch. The versatility of this product sort of gives it a head start in the sales figures. Antipasti, dip, sandwich filling, pasta sauce, salad dressing.... I'm not exactly comparing like with like so it's hard for a jar of olives to compete.

... Soup: Amy's Kitchen organic Rustic Italian vegetable soup sold one more unit than Mouthful's fresh Chicken and Corn Soup (but we only stock the fresh soup in the winter so really the chicken soup is the winner here).